The clergymen of the Established Church will hardly be pleased
if they succeed in making it a common practice for the people of England to bury their dead without any religious service, yet that is the tendency of the obstinacy with which a few of them seem to resist the duty of burying persons whose lives they condemn, —a condemnation, by the way, which falls much oftener on the working-classes, of whose true moral sins and moral temptations they know comparatively little, than on the middle-classes, whose sins and temptations they know better. The Rev. Mr. Coley, vicar of Cowley, in the suburbs of Oxford, has just kept the body of a man named Merrett unburied for twelve days after his death ; and when at last he allowed another clergyman to officiate for him in the burial service, he would not open the church, and ordered that the service should be performed wholly in the churchyard. The result was two separate riots, and on Wednesday last a breaking-open of the church door, the crowd insisting that the coffin should be taken as usual into the church. Clergymen who feel this kind of obstinate objection to doing their duty as the servants of the State, do more than any one else to stimulate religious as well as political disloyalty towards their Church.
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